Epson AcuLaser C1000

It's taken the best part of a century, but colour has now almost completely taken over from mono. Could you imagine newspapers with black and white front-page photos now? More to the point, you're certainly not going to find serious flyers, brochures or posters on badly mono-photocopied plain paper; you don't even need a separately printed colour letterhead any more. Of course, inkjet printing is still uneconomical for bulk printing, so if you want to print large quantities of colour documents you'll need a colour laser printer. Too expensive? Not any more. Epson's AcuLaser C1000 is a four-pass colour laser printer that costs just £899 - the same price as a similar mono laser just a few years ago.

There was only one way Epson could have produced the C1000 at such a low price, and that was by stripping it down to the bare essentials. So there's just a 200MHz processor, a minimal 16Mb of RAM, no network card, maximum resolutions of 600dpi in mono and just 300dpi in colour, and a quoted colour print speed of 5ppm (pages per minute).

The print speeds aren't overestimated though - our 50-page colour letter test was completed at an average of 5.1ppm, and the same went for our 20-page Yesfull-colour PDF test. It may only be printing at 300dpi in colour, but the print quality was superb. High resolutions make little difference to print quality if the printer dithers colours with chunky blocks and patterns, but the C1000 produced colour graphics and photos that most people would be perfectly happy with. The colours are smooth, the dithering is even, and both mono and colour text remains clean and sharp.

The only time we saw a noticeable drop in quality was when printing our photo test, a 30.3Mb PSD file, from Photoshop. The AcuLaser threw back a message saying there wasn't enough memory, so the quality had been dropped. Thankfully, the memory can be upgraded to a maximum of 256Mb, but only by using Epson's own DIMMs - a slight downside, as compatibility with standard memory modules makes life a lot easier and economical. An extra 128Mb from Epson, for example, currently costs £37, and an extra 32Mb for £15 would be a cheap and worthwhile upgrade. That said, these prices pale into insignificance when compared to the £675 required to upgrade the Lexmark C750n (see Reviews, issue 89, p121) by 128Mb.

The print quality was reasonable on all our tests. Black text is the C1000's master trade, completing our 50-page test at an average of 20.2ppm, and its 600dpi text is beautifully clear and sharp, and significantly faster than the 10.1ppm managed by the similarly priced Minolta-QMS magicolor 2200 DeskLaser (see Labs, issue 84, p102). The only downfall in mono printing was printing graphics with greyscales. The C1000 produced overly dark results that lacked fine detail in darker areas.

Mono is also the most economical way of printing, with a black toner cartridge coming in at £44 and working out at just 1.6p per page at 5 per cent coverage. Comparatively, the colour toner cartridges cost £86 each and last the same number of pages at 5 per cent coverage. This makes for an average cost of 8.3p per colour page at 20 per cent CMYK coverage when accounting for all consumables in the printer. Epson's larger profit margins are clearly made on the cost of the extra consumables - it would cost 5p per page if based only on the toner cartridges. Increased running costs are often an inevitable trade-off for buying an initially cheap unit. By comparison, Kyocera's £3,995 FS-8000C (see Reviews, issue 88, p149) works out at just 3.1p per colour page.